Among the Chuvash people of the middle Volga, the meal is not organized into starter-main-dessert but around a nourishing base: a dough or cereal porridge (barley, millet, rye) accompanied by meat, all framed by homemade malt beer (săra) served from start to finish, and closed by a dried cheese or a honey sweet. Meat is rare and precious, reserved for feast days; daily life relies on grains, curdled milk, and preserved stores. Over this peasant table, in Nikolaiev's life, is superimposed a second, radically opposite "cuisine": the freeze-dried tube menu of Soviet space conquest.

Among the Volga peoples, the Chuvash are renowned brewers: the malting of rye or barley (germinating, drying, then crushing the grain) and the bitterness of wild hops perfume both the festive beer săra and the doughs and porridges. It is the gustatory thread linking the village of Shorshely where Nikolaiev grew up to all Chuvash tables.